so should I try to retain my VA registration until November despite probably living the whole year in MA so my vote will matter more for the presidency or should I register in MA so I can vote for Elizabeth Warren?

(xpost) Gingrich may have started the 1860 phrase and Santorum picked up on it, I dunno.

And so now we have Newt Gingrich insisting that 2012 "is the most important election since 1860." And some in the punditocracy go even further; according to columnist E. J. Dionne, "Everyone agrees that the 2012 election will be a turning point involving one of the most momentous choices in American history."

a putative historian on the internet-talk-show annex of NRO, the hoover institution presents uncommon knowledge with peter robinson, pulled this one a few months ago, cuz this election is america's great choice between Administration & Liberty. i am leaning liberty but idk what if i got sick.

Wasn't Eisenhower also pressured to take on Nixon in '52 to pacify the base?

Eisenhower was so popuar – then and after his presidency – that once he crushed the Taft faction he could do what he wanted. No doubt Nixon covered his right flank but you couldn't pressure the Supreme Commander to do anything.

the debt ceiling/credit downgrade thing is one of the things that makes me think that choosing a sitting rep or senator as veep was a bad call for romney - a governor would have taken that tool out of the hands of obama/biden, and i think it could be a pretty effective attack point.

I want to stop here and say that even the definition of “true” that we’re using is loose. “Legitimate” might be a better word. The search wasn’t for arguments that were ironclad. It was just for arguments — for claims about Obama’s record — that were based on a reasonable reading of the facts, and that weren’t missing obviously key context.For instance: Obama really has expanded the size and generosity of the food stamps program. He really has been picking winners and losers in the energy sector. He really does intend to raise taxes on the rich. He really does foresee the federal government spending more a decade from now than it was spending five years ago. He really did push an unelected board of health-care bureaucrats to make decisions about Medicare reimbursement rates. He really did want to raise the price of dirty energy. He really hasn’t released a plan that would ever balance the budget. He really did break his pledge not to raise taxes on people making less than $250,000 when he signed the Affordable Care Act.

But Ryan’s claims weren’t even arguably true. You simply can’t say the president hasn’t released a deficit reduction plan. The plan is right here. You simply can’t say the president broke his promise to keep your GM plant open. The decision to close the plant was made before he entered office — and, by the way, the guy at the top of your ticket opposed the auto bailout. You simply can’t argue that the Affordable Care Act was a government takeover of the health-care system. My doctor still works for Kaiser Permanente, a private company that the government does not own. You simply can’t say that Obama, who was willing to follow historical precedent and sign a clean debt ceiling increase, caused the S&P downgrade, when S&P clearly said it was due to congressional gridlock and even wrote that it was partly due to the GOP’s dogmatic position on taxes.

After rereading Ryan’s speech, I went back to Sarah Palin’s 2008 convention address. Perhaps, I thought, this is how these speeches always are. But Palin’s criticisms, agree or disagree, held up. “This is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform — not even in the state Senate.” True. She accused Obama of wanting to “make government bigger” and of intending to “take more of your money.” That’s not how the Obama campaign would have explained its intentions, but the facts are the facts, and they did have plans to grow the size of government and raise more in tax revenues. Palin said that “terrorist states are seeking nuclear weapons without delay” and “he wants to meet them without preconditions,” which was true enough.

We’ve been conditioned to want to give both sides relatively equal praise and blame, and the fact of the matter is, I would like to give both sides relatively equal praise and blame. I’d personally feel better if our coverage didn’t look so lopsided. But first the campaigns have to be relatively equal. So far in this campaign, you can look fair, or you can be fair, but you can’t be both.

journalists love to give both sides relatively equal praise and blame so much that it takes one of the most prominent political events/speeches of the year, packed with nearly unprecedented amounts of blatant lies, to shake a few journalists out of their rut and get to mention that paul ryan just shoved a bunch of putrid shit down the throats of anyone unlucky enough to pay attention to him speak

The original pitch was for “the five biggest lies in Paul Ryan’s speech.” I said no. It’s not that the speech didn’t include some lies. It’s that I wanted us to bend over backward to be fair, to see it from Ryan’s perspective, to highlight its best arguments as well as its worst. So I suggested an alternative: The true, the false, and the misleading in Ryan’s speech. (Note here that we’re talking about political claims, not personal ones. Ryan’s biography isn’t what we’re examining here though, for the record, I found his story deeply moving.)

An hour later, the draft came in — Dylan Matthews is a very fast writer. There was one item in the “true” section.

and then he goes on to describe how he painstakingly went through the entire speech himself in an attempt to add at least a few more sorta truthy things to it. yeah, he's been critical of ryan and the gop in the past, of course. but i don't think that's just "clearing his throat", i think that's him desperately looking for ways to balance things out a little bit so that next time he sees paul ryan in a hotel lobby he doesn't have to grovel quite so much.

Klein's style isn't truculence; he's got the air of a well-intentioned econ grad student. But he certainly hasn't groveled on Chris Hayes' show. And I read the intro here as an attempt to at least try to assuage an audience that's primed to call him part of the liberal media elite.

Had no idea Frum had this novel called Patriots out: "America's first black president has just lost re-election. A new leader tries to pull the country out of a terrible recession--only to face a devilish plot from inside his own party."

Isn't there a clip of Nixon playing alongside Duke Ellington at the White House?

Reality disconnect #589: "WE BUILT IT! WE BUILT IT! WE BUILT IT! We create the jobs and we drive the economy! Oh yeah, except everything wrong is the President's fault. Cos he's in control of the economy."

there are nearly six thousand posts in the thread and it's high season for politics, you hae to load the whole thread to see what you missed if you leave the house for a couple of hours. it is time for a new thread. I don't know what symmetry requires, if anything, but it's time.